Résumé en anglais

The aim of this article is to identify management control archetypes in an outsourcing context and contingency factors that underlie them. The exploratory case study, carried upon three Moroccan publicly owned offices indicates that two combinations of Ouchi's (1980) management control archetypes (control by the market and the bureaucracy and control by the clan and the bureaucracy) are used. Results also suggest that those inter-organizational control archetypes are linked to the institutional, economic and strategic context of the relation and also to the control system complexity and cost in each outsourcing context.